Diners at Lucky Cheetah in Portland’s Old Port. Derek Davis/Staff Photographer

One day soon, Lucky Cheetah will be a blockbuster of a restaurant. I have no doubt.

For now, about four months into its run, this semi-subterranean, dim-sum-inspired “dumpling lounge” in the Old Port remains a work in progress. But it’s tantalizingly close to excellence.

Co-owners Jared Dinsmore and Wills Dowd (who also own Bird & Co., a taco restaurant in Woodfords Corner) took on a monumental project in renovating the former Old Port Tavern, a restaurant that had occupied its Moulton Street digs for five decades. “The space was exactly what you’d expect from a 200 year-old building,” Dinsmore said. “Everything you can imagine has shifted and changed; everything was out of square. So we needed to bring it back to bare bones. It was a full gut.”

Stepping into the space, you’d never imagine that the duo had to cut through 15 inches of concrete and three feet of mud in order to pour footings to keep the building stable. Nor would you guess that they’d leveled out a dramatic seven-inch pitch that ran from one side of the building to the other. And once the blank space emerged, they had to contend with the basement-level dining room’s utter lack of natural illumination.

The entrance into Lucky Cheetah. “The breathtaking space seems extracted, unedited, from the brain of your favorite maximalist’s favorite maximalist.” Derek Davis/Staff Photographer

Rather than raging against the dying of the light, they leaned in and embraced the virtues of the lightbulb. Wall sconces, retro green-glass chandeliers, LED strip lighting hidden behind velvet floral-print banquettes and at least eight big-ticket Margolis glass pendant lamps beaming over the bar output a magical, transportative glow.

It’s not just lighting that gives the restaurant a wardrobe-to-Narnia ambiance. As you sip a sesame-oil-washed vodka martini ($16, with an optional $13 surcharge for caviar-stuffed green olives), it’s easy to picture yourself as a well-to-do extra in a Wong Kar-Wai film, thanks to Susie Smith Coughlin’s nostalgic and decadent interior. The breathtaking space seems extracted, unedited, from the brain of your favorite maximalist’s favorite maximalist. Take a breath, taste a few drops of your Rabbit’s Foot cocktail ($16), a lavender tea, Genepy and milk-clarified shochu concoction invented by bar manager Ben Bozeman (Honey Paw). Now, look around again.

Red-lacquered milled wood booths, beams and stanchions are nods to Dinsmore and Dowd’s Cantonese inspirations, while Victorian floor mosaics and a pink stone bar seem to name-drop a more mid-century, European ritziness. But wait … there’s more: stripe-y, animal print wallpaper that forces your attention onto framed Slim Aarons photographs of celebrities like Truman Capote and Marilyn Monroe, and, naturally, a wall-to-wall cheetah-print carpet. Why not?

Executive chef Zachary Johnson’s menu, built around the skeleton Dowd and Dinsmore created months before the restaurant opened, mirrors the eclecticism of the space, primarily through its enthusiasm for fusion plates and traditional dishes with oddball components.

The Lucky Martini at Lucky Cheetah. Derek Davis/Staff Photographer

Take the Wagyu egg rolls ($21), two deep-fried parcels of pricey Wagyu beef top round, cabbage, garlic and tingle-inducing Szechuan peppercorns. Nothing too unusual about the filling, but then there’s the wrapper. “We went through 10 iterations of wrapper,” Dinsmore said. “Then Wills came in with a box of phyllo. It’s crispy, flaky and light. You’ve got 30 seconds when you put something wet in (phyllo sheets) before they shred, so it makes prep more difficult, but it’s worth it.” Agreed. But if you order these unusual egg rolls, stick to the black vinegar dipping sauce or the chili oil and avoid the unusually floral “duck sauce” made with Gala apple and apricot.

Another dish that reflects the kitchen’s embrace of the non-traditional is the broccolini with duck crackling ($17). A riff on the American-Chinese “chicken and broccoli” standard, this sharing-sized small plate delivers serious “wok hei” and char on the crucifers, plus a double-dose of crunch via both fried shallots and crunchy skin left over from the confit duck used in the scallion pancake dish ($19). My favorite element of this dish was Dowd’s “zigzag” sauce: a sweet, savory and spicy condiment of oyster sauce, brown sugar, two kinds of pepper and honey. Why zigzag? It’s the pattern Dowd made when dousing the vegetables (perhaps too generously) for service.

Speaking of service, my dinner guest and I experienced an unusual and slightly patronizing genre of it on our recent midweek visit. It began with “I’ll be serving us this evening. Can I bring out some sparkling water for us?” Followed not long thereafter by a strange, rather intimate observation likening our meal to combat: “How goes the battle? Aha. I think we’ve ordered enough food for us.” And finally, when it came time to deliver dessert — an appealing mashup of a Chinese egg tart and Portuguese pastel de nata plated with an aromatic black tea ice cream ($13) – we were greeted with an aspirational speech-act in the form of, “I know we’re going to enjoy this!” Well, we did. Some of us, at least.

Oxtail Ho Fun, Sichuan Cucumbers and sauces including Duck Sauce, Chili Oil and Black Vinegar Sauce at Lucky Cheetah. Derek Davis/Staff Photographer

We (just my dinner guest and I) were also fans of Bozeman’s non-alcoholic Double Zero cocktail ($9), a fizzy libation made with cherry and tart verjus, shaken with ginger syrup and miso, then served up (without ice). What’s most remarkable about this particular drink is that, in its fruity complexity, it mimics the food-pairing capacity of wine. If you’re unsure, try one alongside the oxtail ho fun ($37), one of the four larger-format dishes served at Lucky Cheetah. Here, slow-braised beef and snow peas are folded into a nest of fresh, broad noodles and bathed in a garlicky brown sauce. It’s a good dish, with perhaps twice as much five-spice as it needs, but when you punctuate bites with a sip of the tangy Double Zero (or a glass of the restaurant’s nine by-the-glass champagnes ($11-23), everything settles into a happier equilibrium.

Sichuan Cucumbers at Lucky Cheetah. Derek Davis/Staff Photographer

I wish the same could be said of the Sichuan cucumbers ($14), a spicy bowl piled with spirals of cucumber bathing in an off-kilter sauce prepared with too much vinegar and not enough soy to counterbalance it. Conversely, with the classic, open-topped pork and shrimp shumai ($16), flavors were on-target. But the dumplings did not seem to have been steamed long enough to set the filling, leaving the pasty mixture with a persistent, wet stickiness. Still, both dishes should be easy to fine-tune.

And the same can be said for the entire Lucky Cheetah experience. Despite missteps, many aspects of my visit left me in awe, including the floor manager on duty that evening. During my two-hour visit, he must have earned his full 10,000 steps as he orbited the dining room, collecting and replacing napkins and delivering soft-glowing LED lamps to diners needing a little extra illumination.

Ultimately, some restaurants simply take more time to mature than others, and if this first few months represent Lucky Cheetah’s warm-up, where front-of-house and back-of-house are still tuning to the perfect A-440, that’s OK. There’s nothing wrong with a slow burn when it’s already this hot.

A server bring cocktails to a table at the semi-subterranean Lucky Cheetah. Derek Davis/Staff Photographer

RATING: ***1/2

WHERE: 11 Moulton St., Portland, 207-747-4114 luckycheetahmaine.com

SERVING: 5 – 9 p.m., Tuesday to Thursday, 5 – 11 p.m., Friday & Saturday

PRICE RANGE: Dim sum (small plates): $11-$21, Large plates: $32-$37

NOISE LEVEL: Conga line

VEGETARIAN: Some dishes

RESERVATIONS: Yes, recommended

BAR: Beer, wine and cocktails

WHEELCHAIR ACCESS: Yes

BOTTOM LINE: With a menu inspired by Cantonese dim sum and a lushly renovated interior that evokes Asian-inflected midcentury Mediterranean-coast maximalism, Portland’s Lucky Cheetah might be the most exciting restaurant to open this year. Co-owners Wills Dowd and Jared Dinsmore (who together also own Bird & Co.) view their “dumpling lounge” as a destination for celebrations, champagne, cocktails and small plates. It’s easy to imagine the semi-subterranean space playing host to some seismic revelry. Bar manager Ben Bozeman’s cocktails are absurdly good, including non-alcoholic concoctions like the sparkling cherry-miso Double Zero. Service still has some kinks to iron out, as does the menu, which shines bright in some places — a custardy egg tart served with a scoop of malty black tea ice cream and crisp Wagyu top-round egg rolls wrapped in brittle sheets of phyllo dough are two highlights. Elsewhere, the kitchen’s attention to proportion and detail needs a recalibration. But make no mistake, this is a restaurant that has its sights set on becoming a behemoth. By next summer, it’ll be there.

Oxtail Ho Fun at Lucky Cheetah. Derek Davis/Staff Photographer

Ratings follow this scale and take into consideration food, atmosphere, service, value and type of restaurant (a casual bistro will be judged as a casual bistro, an expensive upscale restaurant as such):

* Poor
** Fair
*** Good
**** Excellent
***** Extraordinary

The Maine Sunday Telegram visits each restaurant once; if the first meal was unsatisfactory, the reviewer returns for a second. The reviewer makes every attempt to dine anonymously and never accepts free food or drink.

Andrew Ross has written about food and dining in New York and the United Kingdom. He and his work have been featured on Martha Stewart Living Radio and in The New York Times. He is the recipient of eight recent Critic’s Awards from the Maine Press Association.

Contact him at: andrewross.maine@gmail.com
Twitter: @AndrewRossME